od in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously
absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any
writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were
correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is
practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If
a woman is only a weaker and inferior kind of man, those
women--themselves, as a rule, the nearest approach to any evidence for
this view--who deny the weakness and inferiority and insist upon the
identity, are justified. Their error and that of their supporters is
twofold.

In the first place, they err because, being themselves, as we shall
afterwards have reason to see, of an aberrant type, they judge women and
womanhood by themselves, and especially by their abnormal psychological
tendencies--notably the tendency to look upon motherhood much as the
lower type of man looks upon fatherhood. It requires closer and more
intimate study of this type than we can spare space for--more, even,
than the state of our knowledge yet permits--in order to demonstrate how
absurd is the claim of women thus peculiarly constituted to speak for
their sex as a whole.

But, secondly, those women and men who assert the doctrine of the
identity of the sexes are led to err, not because it can really be
hidden from the most casual observer that there is a profound
distinction between the sexes, apart from the case of the defeminized
woman--but because, by a surprising fallacy, they confuse the doctrine
of sex-equality with that of sex-identity; or, rather, they believe that
only by demonstrating the doctrine that the sexes are substantially
identical, can they make good their plea that the sexes should be
regarded as equal. The fallacy is evident, and would not need to detain
us but for the fact that, as has been said, the whole tendency of the
time is towards accepting it--the recent biological proof of the
fundamental and absolute difference between the sexes being unknown as
yet to the laity. Yet surely, even were the facts less salient, or even
were they other than they are, it is a pitiable failure of logic to
suppose, as is daily supposed, that in order to prove woman man's equal
one must prove her to be really identical in all essentials, given, of
course, equal conditions. Controversialists on both sides, and even some
of the first rank, are content to accept this absurd position.

The one party seeks to prove th